What do you guys think will happen to the world's economy if nearly all jobs are taken over by AI?

[Odious Delirium]

 

[cars]

I think this is a pretty difficult question. Arguably, we are in uncharted waters.

The main rebuttal I hear from economists when it comes to technological advancements not taking away the human labor force is that, because technological innovations in the past have just shifted focus to the type of jobs that humans do, as opposed to getting rid of humans entirely. For example, the invention of factory machines were thought to get rid of humans in factory jobs. However, humans still need to supervise the equipment, control the equipment, create the technology, and more items being made led to more people needed to sell the goods, drive the goods to stores, etc. However, this assumes that there will always be new jobs created from technological advancements. AI is a new technology, and it is the first time that electricity flowing through silicon can be trained to make a prediction and act on information based on a given dataset.

I think the main argument against AI taking all jobs is that the most AI can (currently) do is mimic whatever humans can. For example, AI chatbots like ChatGPT are not generating new information when you ask them a question. ChatGPT was trained on large datasets of human knowledge, and is essentially predicting what the next word generated should be based on your input. It is not generating new information. It is not a conscious device. Thus, more creative jobs that are not repetitive, or ones requiring human specific skills like social interaction, creativity, etc

But how different is this from how humans behave? As humans, we imitate other people as well, much like AI may imitate results from datasets. As kids, people are taught how to act/be well mannered and through parenting, behave the way they do today because of it. People copy other people's styles, trends, or invent their own trends based on the summation of what they have seen throughout their life. Arguably, one could argue that humans are not wholly unique because people imitate others based on what they have observed over the course of their life. Humans are just better at pretending to be unique because they've gathered large amounts of data over the course of their life, and can store this information with powerful brain neurons more specialized for the task of memory function, cognitive and behavioral skills than electrons in a computer.

Now I don't think AI will take all jobs. Obviously, you need people to manage the technology. There are also a lot of tasks that may be inefficient for AI to do. For example, a robotic nurse would probably be creepy because it would lack the affection and human-like care that a regular nurse would be able to do for otherwise scared and ill patients. A salesman may need the charisma and human like confidence that AI lacks. Also, AI isn't perfect, it very often makes mistakes and this is something that would need to be fixed before it takes jobs. So, even if an AI does the job, a human will still need to approve and review the work. Self driving cars, for example, are unable to make decisions in untrained situations (i.e. some unfamiliar construction in the road) whereas a human can quickly make a decision and adapt. This is despite the fact that a human has likely less experience than the AI (terabytes of AI training data vs the human's own driving hours), and the human brain weighing much less than such terabytes of data in a data center. This makes AI much more costly to implement compared to hiring a human to do the same job, though once the AI is able to do the task it is much cheaper than continuing to pay the labor costs. My guess is that, if AI takes jobs, it will likely take a few decade(s) to perfect the technology, if not longer. Though, I think that it is realistic to see AI blend in with jobs (i.e. employees starting to use AI to ease their work) in the near future.

 

[Yaraye]

We don't know cuz we all gonna be dead by then